Insane Mode...Is

Is Gears 3's hardest difficulty just really hard? Or is it broken?

Gears of War 3 is a phenomenal game. It boasts the strongest, longest, and most compelling story of its trilogy, complete with fantastic characters, entertaining (if occasionally campy) dialogue. It is truly the pinnacle of the Unreal engine in graphics and gameplay, and feels so incredibly polished as to render all former games in its genre moot. Its multiplayer offerings shame those of even the most hardcore fragfests.

There's plenty to say about Gears 3, but today I want to focus on one in particular: Insane mode…is.

For the uninitiated, the campaign (and some multiplayer modes) can be tuned to one of four difficulty options: casual, normal, hardcore, and insane. Each is quite appropriately named, with a casual playthrough requiring very little in stress or skill from the player, and hardcore providing a challenge to even seasoned fans of the series. Insane mode prompts the question, are you a masochist? If the answer is yes, then by all means, continue.

Now, I may not be the greatest gamer ever, and I've never been spectacular at Gears, but I do fancy myself decent enough to hold my own in most hard games, the most notable exception being this year's Catherine, which was so preposterously difficult (on Normal) that I have been afraid to return to it ever since the third boss prompted me to ragequit in frustration. I appreciate a good challenge, and I want to make it very clear that I do my best to differentiate between failure that is my fault and failure that I could not have avoided.

I have only played the first chapter of Gears 3 on insane mode alone. I soon realized that the typical safety net -- that when one is shot too much, one is "downed" until a teammate can revive him -- had been removed, and that stepping rashly out from behind cover has rather dire, and immediate, consequences. In short: if you get shot much, you die. Game over. Back to the checkpoint.

Coupled with an increase in enemy tenacity and numbers, this makes for a rather brutal, but fair, experience. Insane mode may be tough, but it is not impossible. It is made easier, too, by the inclusion of three AI partners, whose design is so effectual that the chief complaint among gamers and reviewers seems to be that they are too good. Having had my share of easy kills stolen from me on my Normal run-through, I can attest to that annoyance; but on insane mode, they become life-savers, taking down enemies you simply can't get a good shot at, and drawing otherwise-lethal fire away from you just long enough for you to do what needs doing.

Since the AI are more than capable of holding their own, and since they, unlike you, seem to be invincible, I imagine a complete play-through of Insane will involve a great deal of hiding behind things and praying that your squad will take care of the nastier enemies so you don't have to. That's not a matter of cowardice so much as it is practicality; some enemies in the game are quite capable of killing you outright instantly, and as Gears 3 has introduced new projectile attacks to the enemy repertoire, simple cover-based blindfiring is rarely an option.

When it's just you whose death causes a checkpoint restart, and when you have three invincible allies to assist your progress, insane mode is merely a much harder, much slower, but still reasonable experience.

But how about co-op?

Conventional wisdom suggests that having four thinking, human players beats an AI squad any day of the week, and in most games, that'd be true. Not with Gears.

You see, the four-player co-op which makes the other difficulties so enjoyable renders Insane mode a mere exercise in self-torture, as it replaces your three impenetrable death-machine companions with three equally-vulnerable, equally-screwed friends who will do quite a lot of yelling at each other (even if in jest) for dying basically all the time.

Initially, it is simply a matter of learning the harsh reality that there's no longer such a thing as Down-But-Not-Out. You won't hear Marcus' gruff voice yelling "revive me!" every ten seconds because no one gets revived on Insane. What you'll hear instead is "Oh, $#%&" followed by a red screen with the words "objective failed." Every firefight is a new and unforgiving schoolmaster, from whom you must learn the precise timing and location of every enemy before being permitted to survive long enough to reach the next checkpoint. It's hard, and sometimes it's insane, but it's still fair.

But as you get further into the game, thoughts start to run through your mind of your last time through the campaign, and you begin to recall certain moments which took you hours to complete even on lesser difficulties. Times where one player (or your AI companions) were reviving you every few seconds because, say, a Gunker was spamming explosions in your direction, or a Lambent Berserker was running TRON trails of imulsion through you, or the final boss was absolutely relentless. And you start to wonder -- if we lose every time any of us even gets hurt, is it even possible to finish what we've undertaken?

I'm all for a game that's very hard, but when the question of whether it is even possible to accomplish something as simple as mere survival is raised, I begin to have my doubts. There have been moments in which my team and I have quite literally been killed the very moment a cutscene ended or a fight broke out -- killed by an enemy whose attack is unblockable, unavoidable, and undodgeable. We've quite literally restarted the same checkpoint thirty or forty times in a half-hour, having had no chance to even move from our starting points without suddenly dying. For the last two nights we've died so frequently that we have actually chosen to stop playing simply because we were getting too angry and too hopeless to continue.

We are not bad players. When our deaths happen before, or within one second of when we have actual control of our characters, the finger needs to be pointed elsewhere. So Epic? I'm looking at you. You made an excellent game, and you've created a very challenging single-player experience. But four-player Insane campaign is simply badly-made. It steps beyond the realm of challenge because it punishes even when no mistakes are made, and into the realm of brokenness because it stalls progress artificially, forcing the players to rely on pure luck, rather than skill, for survival.

I'm not usually one for statistics, but I really would like to know: has anyone managed to complete this campaign with all four players on Insane? And, if so, how long did it take? How many times did they experience failure they could not possibly have prevented?

That they are.

I guess I'm just not sure "challenge" is appropriate for what's going on here. A challenge is supposed to test my ability...but when I am killed before my controller even responds to my hand, there's not really anything I could do differently. So it's not really even challenging. It's just unfair.